HabitRPG is an app designed to help users build habits in their real lives through the use of an online role playing game. The user starts off with a basic level one avatar with no equipment. If you’re browsing the HabitRPG site there are four columns (in the mobile they are categories):

1. Habits – Things you do more than once a day such as drink water. These can be either positive or negative. For example if you want to be more healthy it would be a positive habit to take the stairs and a negative action to take the elevator.
2. Dailies – Things you do everyday once a day. For example, you might want to read for 45 minutes everyday or exercise for an hour. These tasks can be further edited to repeat only on certain days if, for example, you would like to go to the gym only every other day or just on weekdays.
3. To-Dos – Pretty self-explanatory, these are things that you need to do once such as going to the dentist’s office or writing up a paper for class. You can set a due date for to-dos to keep track of assignments or projects.
4. Rewards – Here you can buy equipment for your avatar to use or purchase rewards for yourself such as eating a piece of cake or watching Game of Thrones. You pay using coins that you earn from finishing tasks.

The game is simple. When you do a positive habit or finish your Dailies or To-dos you gain experience for your avatar helping you to level up and unlock more skills and access more of the HabitRPG site. However, if you miss your daily tasks or if you do a negative habit you take damage to your health. Take enough damage to your health and you die making you lose a level, all your gold, and one random piece of equipment. Needless to say, dying is not pleasant.

Personally, I really like this program for keeping up with my tasks. At first I thought about just getting a regular to-do list app or using an old-fashioned piece of paper and a pen, but really this is so much more fun. I always like role playing games growing up so when I saw this app I thought I would give this a try, especially because this app is free!

The organization with the four different columns helps me to get all the things I need done in a week scheduled while also helping me build long-term habits. Since I started using HabitRPG I’ve actually become much more productive and have been getting my stuff done in a much more timely manner. There are some really great questing aspects to the program as well as a collection aspect in the form of pets and steeds which you can hatch from eggs that you randomly pick up from positive tasks after a certain level has been achieved. The people in the forums are super friendly and helpful and provide a great way to keep accountable to your tasks.

However, this program relies on your honesty. It can be really tempting to just check a daily task even when you haven’t done it just because you want to avoid damage to your health or claim a positive habit multiple times just to level up. So if you are the type of person who is prone to seeing a game as just a game or if you find it too much of a temptation to cheat then this app might not be for you.

If you’re interested in trying out HabitRPG you can check them out at habitrpg.com or if you have a smartphone they have an app available in both the Apple iTunes Store and the Android’s Google Play Store.